The Girl of the Lake

by Bill Roorbach

  I was no tribal prince, but I had an interest in politics, with a goal of elective office (why did this amuse my new flatmate so?). And my father was no important chieftain but a well-paid and vitriolic cowhide stretch-and-cut operator at a tanning plant in Kansas City, Missouri.

  My first week as a rent-paying denizen of Oxford was filled with new impressions, dozens of near-fatal steps into left-hand traffic, bangers and mash for breakfast, and the start of my summer Government program at Oxford, which was thrilling and absurdly demanding: seminars and tutorials and caucuses, stacks of books to read, position papers and analyses to write, and, of course, robust socializing to attend to each evening. I got home close after ten most nights—pub closing—and every night found Sileshi asleep. I learned to open the stairwell door quietly into his room and make my way quietly to my own. I read stirring, sobering course texts by candlelight (there was no lamp or electrical outlet in my room, an insignificant defect, I thought), read until one or two in the morning. When I woke at eight—leaving barely time to dress and make the first caucus each day—Sileshi was always already gone. For two weeks we didn’t exchange a syllable, though he was firmly part of my life. His incense sweetened the flat. He left exotic stews for me in stone bowls, fruits cut open and arrayed on beautiful woven cloths, strange nuts, sour candies. It didn’t occur to me to reciprocate or that the place was so clean because he cleaned it.

  In that second week I took an interest in an Irish student nicknamed Baby, real name of Colleen, not one of the formidable minds from my program but a waitress from the Pig and Prudence Pub, which we all frequented. She was formidable in her way, too, don’t get me wrong; it’s just that for her there were other subjects besides Marxism. Callow boy, I was surprised to learn she was a top student, a rising senior like me but reading in history, and unconflicted about taking the summer to make some cash far away from her Irish parents. I found out her day off and one evening drank enough to ask her out on an American picnic. She was charmed by Sileshi’s spare blanket and the park he’d suggested, charmed by the great empty lawn over the river, charmed by the bread and cheeses, the three bottles of wine, and especially charmed by Sileshi’s well-worn soccer ball, which I’d borrowed in a fit of inspiration, having told him I was going out with a few of the boys. After some hilariously physical one-on-one against a rubbish-bin goal, Baby and I ate lunch, then got ourselves quite smashed, serious talk of novels and dog breeds and airplanes (her pa a dead pilot) and finally the loneliness of the foreign student, and soon we were kissing and soon again packing up the picnic to go to my place where she said there’d best be no funny business. That with her hand in my front trousers pocket, where no girl’s hand had gone before. Sileshi wasn’t home, thankfully, and we fell on my slim mattress and soon it was all funny business, drunken declarations, and even tears of love around such salacious acts as I had never taken part in, all powered by Baby’s instructive gusto.

  “We’ve soaked your sheets,” she said memorably, merrily. At least some part of the moisture was a Rhinelander wine she’d bought on the walk home, bottle four, and which we’d spilled in our naked enthusiasm.

  Tangled together we embarked on still more peculiar business, followed by a plummet into sleep. I woke in the night to the sound of dishes in the apartment’s tiny kitchen, the swish of a broom, pounding headache, the girl naked half atop me. I noted with chagrin that the clothes we’d shed were folded in two neat piles. The wine bottle was gone, the glasses we’d drunk from missing. I smelled Sileshi’s evening food preparation (breakfast little different from dinner), garlic and cardamom and meat, heard him eating the meal bite by bite at the tiny kitchen table. Baby didn’t stir, breathed heavily, all of her pressed into me, lovely luck. I heard my flatmate’s prayers then, and shortly the lights went out. An hour later Baby woke and gave me squeezes.

  She whispered, “What’s the stench?” Sileshi’s dinner, of course, and incense. The funny business resumed. In fact, quietly as possible, we snogged and shagged and shimmied till dawn, my vocabulary growing. Then Baby had to go. Her flatmates would be “dilly bothered” at her absence, she said, six of them, all girls from the home country.

  IN THE MORNING I was surprised to find Sileshi at the kitchen table. He was a statue, gazed at me ruefully as I made my daily peanut butter jelly sandwich. His cicatricial array formed a greater frown, made him fearsome.

  “Unclean,” he said finally.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “To ferry a whore here!”

  “A whore? No, no. She’s a friend.”

  “Some kind of friend!”

  “A girlfriend.”

  “And intoxicants,” he said, voice rising. “This is wrong. And to leave it to me to tidy the mess. Do you have servants at home?”

  I thought of my mother’s kindly face. I thought of my diplomacy seminar, in which I’d already learned much. I framed his argument per instruction: “You don’t want women here in the apartment, and you want me to do my share of the cleaning.”

  “Quite,” he said.

  I offered honest apologies and promises I could keep, spoke formally as he had, kept his eye as he kept mine: “I’ve been remiss. I will clean daily to catch up with you. I noticed you’ve been making my bed, folding my clothes. I’ve had no chance to thank you for your kindness in this as in all things. The problem, I think, is that you get to it before I am able. Perhaps our standards are slightly different. Please leave my mess and I will get to it. Leave your own from here on in and I will clean for you, too.”

  We held a long silence. I didn’t even dare bite my PBJ.

  Finally his face softened. His head made the slightest tilt, progress for diplomacy. He said, “You speak well. Your proposal is just. Though one can’t just ‘leave a mess,’ as you put it. A mess must be seen to.”

  I took on the next issue: “Were Colleen and I too loud for you?”

  Sileshi hardened again. “It’s hardly a matter of volume,” he said.

  It’s a matter of envy, I thought, but I said, “You don’t approve of sex?”

  He gasped, cried out, said, “I have never said the word! These are marital relations, and you, little brother, are not married!”

  My emotion rose: “But I think I am in love, and I think she is—her name is Colleen—and in our two cultures, which are not absolutely the same, but quite different from your own, our relations are our own business.”

  “In my house, not.”

  “This is my house too.”

  “You sully your house.”

  “We’ll leave before you’re home,” I said.

  “Whether I am here or not, you are seen.”

  I pulled him into a hug, that gesture I’d learned from him, spoke into his ear. “Flatmate. You and I should spend time together, get to know one another.”

  Sileshi’s head tilted sidewise on its own volition. He pushed me away to gauge my seriousness. His brow unknit itself. “I am home today,” he said.

  I was full of the magnanimity of my night with Baby, and still half-drunk. I declared that I would be home, too. Sileshi went cheerfully to his room, dressed himself in a long cotton gown, dull white with a geometric pattern in green and gold sewn into the hem and sleeves. We took a long walk to Derrydown Castle, which he’d read about, passing through neighborhoods of growing opulence, and Sileshi gave a disquisition along the way on the fluid meaning of wealth across societies and continents. It wasn’t an argument I entirely followed, but Sileshi swayed me with his passion, also big gestures, those missing fingers the very ghosts of emphasis. His conclusion arrived like the end of an aria, the music of ideas, and a group of our fellow pedestrians turned to stare: in his world, at least, the only solution was going to be a period of extreme militant anarchism, then in the ashes a return to tribal ways and lands.

  “Isn’t that unlikely?” I said after a silence.

  Sileshi’s passion was spent. He only shrugged, said, “Even the highest coconut finds its way down.” He
took my hand, and we walked holding hands till—American boy—I was decently able to let go, feigning the need to point.

  At the castle we took the tour, lingering over the dungeons and a horrifying display of the machines and implements of medieval torture.

  Sileshi sighed mightily. He said, “I know why they made these things.”

  “I guess we all do,” I said.

  “I guess we all don’t,” he said.

  I was content to leave it at that.

  On the walk home he pulled up suddenly, stopped me, took my hands, gazed into my eyes in his unsettling way. His grip trembled, his eyes grew liquid. I awaited a political query.

  “How much did you pay her?” he said.

  “She’s a friend,” I said, taken aback. “I didn’t pay her, and she didn’t pay me. A person doesn’t have to pay.”

  “I know so little,” he said.

  THE NEXT MORNING, AS I rushed along the old streets to campus, books stacked architecturally under my arm, I became aware that someone was dogging me, following closer and then further behind. I looked over my shoulder, not much to see, just a businessman, as I read him, brown suit, black tie, buzz cut, clearly the enemy. I took a medieval alleyway, and the man took it, too. If he was following me, he wasn’t trying to hide the fact. Under an ivied archway at the university I pulled up short, cocky kid, and waited for him. I knew a policeman when I saw one. And he didn’t break stride, just marched right up to me.

  Unperturbed, I said, “May I help you?”

  He hissed, “How do you know Silboumi?”

  “Barely,” I said, wise guy.

  He grabbed my throat in one hand, smashed me up against the stone wall silently, sending my books flying. He then proceeded to knock my head repeatedly against the masonry. I kicked—all I could do in my position—and that earned me an expert knee in the groin. The thug held my throat till I thought I would pass out, then knocked my head again, hard, let me fall to the ground where I lay groaning and gagging among my tumbled books.

  BABY THOUGHT MY ROOMMATE A HUNK, and she told him so repeatedly, as if his problem with women and sex were one of self-esteem. He’d slowly accepted Baby’s presence in our kitchen and seemed to linger longer in the mornings. Buh-bee, as he called her, was a great toucher of hands and faces. Wrapped less than modestly in my bedsheets, she’d lean to him over one of his breakfast presentations and touch his decorated cheeks, tell him she thought her flatmate Shelagh would “spin” over him. Sileshi didn’t know what a date was, much less a blind date, and to spin was surely a sin, but he grinned and tilted his head every time Shelagh’s name came up.

  He wouldn’t say yes to a date, so Baby took it into her own hands, arranging a dinner to surprise them both, against my more cautious instincts. But I was the shill and Sileshi and I waited in the little restaurant she’d picked, nervously eyeing the prices. And then the young women came in. We gentlemen rose, bowed courtly. Shelagh was nearly six inches taller than my chaste flatmate, thin and sincere, a beanpole, not a beauty like Baby but handsome, her lofty intelligence clear in her face and green eyes. She gave a commanding curtsy as Baby introduced her.

  Sileshi gave a short cry at the name Shelagh, looked up at her in obvious panic.

  “You’ve been touched by God’s hands,” she said, and boldly put her own mortal fingers on my roommate’s facial welts, thumbs on the off-welts over his eyes. I’d never realized the significance of the array till that moment.

  Sileshi closed his eyes. Beads of sweat appeared on his brow. “Precisely,” he said.

  “Ach, Shelagh, you’re not to handle my young man,” Baby said. She patted my roommate’s bottom, gave it a squeeze.

  Sileshi surprised me by letting out a high giggle. And the giggle didn’t stop—he stood there in his normal stiff posture giggling. The giggling got the girls going, too, and there he was, hands all over him, a puddle of glee.

  Shelagh let her fingers rest on his face till she’d felt his soul, finally let go.

  “She’s got some bumps of her own to show you,” Baby said salaciously, and winked at me.

  I just wanted the girls to stop.

  We took our seats around a tiny table. The bargirl came by, a gum-snapping acquaintance of Baby’s, and after some banter Baby ordered wine. Sileshi drew himself up. “I cannot.”

  “Scotch, then,” Shelagh said.

  Sileshi sweated and tilted his head and grinned unstoppably and drank Scotch one to one with our glasses of wine, quite as if he were familiar with alcohol. By dessert he’d relaxed somewhat, his attention focused on Shelagh like a ray, and it was clear Baby had been right: the two of them were a match. They were black and white as a newspaper, but I was apparently the only one thinking that way, American boy. Sileshi found his tongue, though, found words somewhere deep inside him, began to make his gentle jokes, told a long story of a lion he’d encountered in his youth, used his mysterious metaphors (“angry as a man with nutshells ’round his lodge”). Shelagh leaned at him, clutched his arm at every laugh, suddenly asked after his missing fingers, something I’d not brought myself to do in all the weeks I’d known my prince.

  “Fortunately I am right handed,” he said.

  “But how did it happen?” said Baby.

  “That very lion,” said Sileshi, tilting his head, pinching his thumb and pinky together repeatedly, an unconscious gesture.

  “Bosh,” said Shelagh.

  Sileshi sat up very straight, thought for some moments, looked at each of us in turn, patted Shelagh’s arm with the deformed hand. He said, “It was an explosive device. When I had but five years.” He’d say no more, though we quizzed him. Gradually then, he shifted the conversation to my home country (how had I felt when the Kennedys were killed?) and that of the young women (deadly Ireland). His part of the world had no monopoly on political violence, was his point.

  BY THE END OF the evening, all four of us were back in the little apartment, Sileshi having made no protests. The girls were already calling him Boom-Boom, which would stick. In the kitchen dear Baby said, “Here’s the way to do it,” and began to kiss me. I held back in embarrassment, but Shelagh took Sileshi’s face in her hands, kissed his lips gently. He hadn’t shown signs of much intoxication, but at the touch of her tongue dropped instantly to the floor in an unrousable faint.

  The next several dates went better, and before long hardly a night passed by when both girls weren’t in our rooms. Sileshi took to hanging the hallway carpet over his door to muffle her prodigious moaning—he himself was always utterly silent. His little clay figures turned their backs on the room when the girl was there, I noted.

  I held off telling them about the man who’d attacked me. Baby would hit the roof, I knew, demand action. I had no clue what to make of the event, in any case. Plus, Sileshi was so nervous to start with, always looking around the pub if we were out, always asking where the nearest exit was, wearing English clothing by night, hiding his face under his umbrella, rain or no. His private face—when reading a book, for example—was hard and pensive, knit brows, deep frown. He sighed frequently, even groaned at times. In any case it was obvious, also thrilling: Sileshi, our prince, was under the eye of British intelligence.

  Baby thought him merely shy.

  Shelagh became the unofficial leader of our little group. She found us all pathetically philistine when it came to matters of her subject, which was art and art history. Under her wing, we went to the museums, even taking the Saturday train into London several weeks running. She pored over paintings in a way that had never occurred to me, standing close and then far, even touching the painted surface when the guards were elsewhere, constantly setting off alarms. She hugged a statue of David, grasping his buttocks, not kidding, not in the slightest: this was true love. She liked to read to us from her textbooks and from her art magazines, even at pub. And at pub she grilled Sileshi about the art of his world: she was disdainful that he knew so little. He tried hard to please her, began to study his own cultur
e, neglected his students, his writing.

  She was disdainful in other ways, too, just subtly, just enough to keep a friend off balance and a lover slightly desperate. I don’t think she did it on purpose, it was just her way: you should know what she knew, value what she valued, and if you didn’t, you could piss off. Sileshi changed his syllabus under her eye, did a section on economies of art, undertook studies of African art as it was collected in the British Isles. We visited some tiny galleries and vest-pocket museums with Shelagh: the stuff was everywhere. Soon enough I was talking the politics of art in my government caucus, always parroting Shelagh, and found to my delight that I’d finally interested my chief don and his terrifying acolytes. Even as the summer waned I became the spokesman for art and culture at school, desperately quizzing Shelagh every night to get my points lined up for the following day’s arguments, wedding my new pet subject to our ongoing discussions of imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, socialism, continentalism, Marxism, and of course (with no proper nod to Sileshi), tribalism.

  Our little crowd’s last Saturday train was to the west side of London. Through her father, a top aide to a top MP, Shelagh had gotten tickets to the opening of an exhibit of Polynesian art gathered from museums all over the world. We four huddled, holding glasses of free wine, eating free caviar on points of toast, lingering over each work in the show, taking two hours, studying weave and stroke and whittle, provenance, ownership, a universe complete unto ourselves. As the party roaring around us grew even louder, the laughter yet more hilarious, we found ourselves circum-ogling an amazing outrigger canoe loaned with some fanfare by the Natural History Museum in New York. Sileshi gazed at it with us, pulled himself up in a way that was becoming familiar to me. He began to move his head side to side with a waggle, the opposite of the tilt, I knew.

  He spat, “Why is nothing in this exhibit from Polynesia?”